


The Spirit World of Mars

by Lavanya_Six



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Terraforming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-08
Updated: 2013-09-08
Packaged: 2017-12-25 23:24:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/958845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavanya_Six/pseuds/Lavanya_Six
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rei Yoruno could bend all four elements. It had taken her the better part of a quarter century, by old-style counting, to master those arts. She had no past lives to fall back on, no impossible muscle memory guiding her. And for all her tireless effort, the first Avatar of the Red Planet often found herself silently grappling with her fears for the point of it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Spirit World of Mars

**Author's Note:**

> A sequel to "[An Avatar of Mars](http://archiveofourown.org/works/338351)".

_Huo Hsing was an old world. Fourth planet from the sun, it had breathed out its last billions of years ago, content to rust in the darkness while its neighbor one orbit sunward lived on to flourish._

_It was tectonically dead, old impact scars enduring a thousand million years of sandstorm scouring. It had no ineffable spark to regulate its rhythms; unlike Earth, Huo Hsing was a mad place where it could be winter in one hemisphere and summer in the other._

_Yet now, after an eternal death that had in fact been merely a long sleep, Huo Hsing was stirring..._

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Fire. Air. Water. Earth.

Rei Yoruno could bend all four elements. It had taken her the better part of a quarter century, by old-style counting, to master those arts. She had no past lives to fall back on, no impossible muscle memory guiding her. And for all her tireless effort, the first Avatar of the Red Planet often found herself silently grappling with her fears for the point of it all.

On Huo Hsing, firebending was mostly a liability, a thief of precious oxygen. Before she had airbent for the first time, Rei had spent all her time essentially learning not to firebend. Dragon's breath might be good for keeping one warm in a sealskin exosuit, but that was an advanced skill. Only the best were alloted the necessary oxygen rations to refine their firebending, and Rei's abilities had always been somehow lacking, even by a non-Avatar's standards.

Electricity was what the colonists needed, and not for nothing did Rei's agemates comment how odd it was that 'Fire' was considered an element when clearly 'Lightning' was far more common on their world.

On Huo Hsing, airbending was a pointless art. There were too few airbenders to allow them to undertake the long, risky journey between planets, where an errant solar flare could sterilize or kill the passengers. Never mind that the atmosphere on Huo Hsing was still far too thin for airbenders to move about as they did back on Earth.

Rei herself had adapted most of the airbending moves used on Huo Hsing, relying on instructional vids streamed from Earth and scanlations of antique Air Nomad scrolls. She found no practical use for the art outside of the habitats. Even then, she didn't like to fly around with it. A native-born woman like her needed every bit of exercise she could get to maintain her naturally weak muscles on her homeworld's low gravity. Ghosting around with airbending just meant she had to compensate with more time in the gym later.

Earthbending and waterbending, those abilities were precious for expanding the colonies; digging new habitat levels ever-deeper into the crust, expanding the web of canals that criss-crossed their dry, dusty world.

Rei Yoruno could bend all four elements. She didn't need them all, and in fact rarely used two of them outside of her dojo.

But she was still not the Avatar yet.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

"Huo Hsing has no Spirit World, as far as we know."

"Assuming there's more than one," another sage piped up. "We don't know that."

The head White Lotus officer shot his companion a dirty look. "We can argue metaphysics later. The point, Avatar, is that you cannot be considered fully realized until you master the Avatar State. To do that, you need to connect with your spiritual side."

Rei simply nodded. Yet another hoop to jump through. That was not unexpected.

"After much debate, we've resolved that the problem of timing is no problem at all. Our world always has two seasons at once. So what if one pole should be at the summer solstice while the other is at the winter solstice? No, the real issue is location. Our world is a dead planet coming to life, but it lacks spiritual places, oases, proper shrines. So we've compiled a list of candidate locations for you to meditate on the solstice and reach across worlds."

After reviewing the tablet's list, Rei was unimpressed. Mountaintops. Valley bottoms. Caves. The Avatar thought it likely the White Lotus had simply copied a wiki listing of notable locations on their world and retitled it.

"What about people?" she asked. "We brought life to this world, or maybe just woke it up. Shouldn't wherever I meditate reflect that?"

The White Lotus officers glanced at one another. Perhaps it was her lifetime of living with the practical implications of metaphysical questions, like whether she would even reincarnate after death into a new Avatar, or be reborn as-is with continuity of memory, that gave her the perspective they lacked. Sometimes she felt apart from them, as she was a nativeborn and they were Earthborn. What Rei knew for certain was that the sages would bicker over theoretical minutia all day if she let them, and she had no time to waste today. She was already one extension deep into her term paper on the history of the United Republic's Second Democratic Experiment, and desperately wanted to give her incomplete rough draft another pass.

"I have somewhere specific in mind," she lied.

"Where?" their leader asked.

One place being as good as any other on a world without history, she offered the first answer that came to mind.

"Yeah," their leader said, "that's not gonna happen."

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

It did, in fact, not happen.

The colonial leadership had never been wildly enthusiastic about their own Avatar, treating her more as a mild celebrity than anyone of note. The veneration they had shown Earth's Avatar during his visit several years back to aid in terraforming the planet had taught Rei that much.

She, like Huo Hsing, had no real history. The government wasn't going to let her traipse around their world's one real heritage site: the First Landing, where humans had initially set foot on this world. They were, however, perfectly happy to suggest an "equally significant" landing site for her to meditate at and possibly damage to her heart's content.

It was a spot far out in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest outpost, let alone full-fledged colony. Over a century ago the first robotic probe had landed there, in the middle of a planet-wide dust storm, and managed to transmit all of seventy lines of data from one photo before going silent. It had offered nothing scientifically important or useable. The scrambled, incomplete photo itself was little more than a blur, and was only important because it was the first image transmitted from the surface of this world back to Earth.

The probe itself had been titled, in a show of immense creativity, _Huo Hsing II._

Ultra-fine sand crunching under her boot soles, Rei ambled around the heritage site, GPS in one hand and earthbending with her other, digging the probe out from the sand dune that had buried it. She moved slowly, not wanting to damage the probe. It might have just been a historical footnote, but that just provided a sense of empathy in her mind.

It took the better part of two hours to find and excavate it. The coordinates hadn't been exactly correct, and, lest her briefly exposed skin get bruised and frostbit by the thin cold air, she had to burn valuable oxygen from her reserve tank for a flaming punch into the ground to activate her tremor sense. Still, she found it, and that's all that mattered.

The faded Earth Kingdom flag emblazoned on its scorched, pitted casing barely registered as green under the cold bronze sun. The color was a foreign one to Huo Hsing, and Rei Yoruno found her eyes drawn to it magnetically.

Belatedly, she snapped a pic of the long-forgotten probe. If nothing else, it meant she had something small to show for the time wasted today.

Alone for far around, Rei settled into as best a lotus form as she could manage in a spacesuit. Even in her heated, gengineered sealskin suit it was a tricky prospect. She tabbed off her radio and satellite link, leaving just her, her oxygen tank, and the faint whistling of the thin wind outside her suit.

Time to meditate.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Several hours later, Rei woke up to the safety alarm on her oxygen tank. A stiff walk to her rover netted a fresh tank. Her hand hovered over the uplink toggle, but she wasn't willing to give up yet, if only because it would entail thinking about what came next.

Sometimes, she wished Avatar Yinsen was still around to talk with, but he had gone back to Earth years ago, and besides that was three years dead. The homeworld's next Avatar wouldn't appear for years, and what would Rei have to say to a child?

Yinsen, though, had been the real deal. Old school sage. He hadn't even taken any of the gen or trans mods, not even for his failing vision. He'd worn _glasses_ like someone out of an old-timey vid.

Settling back in front of the decrepit probe, Rei tried to meditate again in the silence. She tried mulling the history of this probe, how it had flown millions of miles across the gulf of space on calculations done by hand using something called a 'slide ruler', how the scientists who built it must have been so disappointed by the failure of their probe, embodied in a lousy seventy-line scrambled image.

All that effort, Rei mused to herself, and it didn't even have the dignity of being a _complete_ failure.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Eventually, two days and many tanks of oxygen later, Rei climbed back into her rover. Her body was crusty with dried sweat inside its sealskin suit, her catheter had begun to itch something fierce, and the food bars and recycled water she had subsisted on had grown too vile for her even to glance at.

Avatar Rei kept her communicator silenced for the return drive. There would be time to confront her failure later. For now she sat in the driver's cabin, a computer chauffeuring her back to the nearest outpost for refueling, and stared out at the dunes and rocks and clouds that passed by.

Perhaps there was no Spirit World here on Huo Hsing. Or maybe she simply lacked the proper conviction to let go of her material self and transcend this reality. Rei really didn't know, and, if she had to be honest with herself, and after nearly three days alone in the wilderness it felt impossible not to be, she was past caring.

Even if she had entered the Spirit World, what good would it do to help her master her Avatar State? She was the first Avatar of the Red Planet, and had a grand total of one unfinished lifetime's power and knowledge to call on. Her successor, if she had one, would at least get something out of the process, even if it only gave them the grand total of one extra person's bending to supplement their own.

Rei Yoruno was tired of jumping through an endless series of hoops. She was a little over thirteen years old now, by new-style counting using Huo Hsing's years. How long had she lingered at university, splitting her time between her studies and things that didn't really matter? Years. _Real_ years. Red Planet years.

When she got back home, there would be no more White Lotus academic debates or endless practice sessions. It would be onto the things that actually mattered in life: school, her friends, a career.

Let whatever would happen, happen. Rei was done staring at old dead things.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

_Huo Hsing was stirring..._

_The process had begun before its ice caps had been melted into fresh seas, or its crust cracked to unleash the molten heat within._

_Huo Hsing had an Avatar of its own, and the Red Planet was alive because of the people who had come there to live and die._


End file.
